The Music Lesson (11 page)

“But it’s not the best of Vermeer, even though it’s magnificent,” I persisted, this being something about which I am unrelentingly passionate.
“The Little Street
is the only other painting that’s not an interior, unless you count some of the early religious or allegorical pictures, which show some sky, but I’m not even considering those because they interest me the least. I think Vermeer lost control of the light when he left his rooms.
The Little Street
has some of the intimacy of pictures like
The Music Lesson
, but if you’re asking me to pick a winner, your
Lady Writing a Letter
comes in second to
The Music Lesson
by a good length.”

The language of horses is metaphorical for most people, but it happens to be one I know because Paddy used
to take me to the races a lot when I was a kid and talk to me about handicapping.

What looks promising, sweetheart? he would ask. I picked them based on the names, usually, just names I liked. Paddy played wild hunches based on numbers. There were six birds on the fence, which had six strands of wire—so, the number six horse in the sixth. He won, sometimes.

Paddy would walk me to the window, teach me how to place a two-dollar bet, to which he would stake me. Nosey Mike to show at ten to one. Miss Berry Time to win at six to one. My first savings account was started with my winnings when I was about eight. I still sometimes like to take a peek at the
Racing Form
, just for the names.

I studied
The Music Lesson
awhile, absentmindedly taking in the odd tone of Mickey’s questions, and rambled on.

“Of course, even if we wanted to hop on a plane, we couldn’t see this particular painting for a while. There’s no way in hell we could get tickets for the last days in The Hague—people at work were telling me just this morning that we couldn’t swing it for one of our lots-a-bucks trustees who called from there to see if our director could pull strings. Every minute is spoken for—it’s like the last plane out of Saigon.”

“I’d like to see your
Music Lesson,”
Mickey said softly.

“Not mine. The queen’s, actually. Anyway, it usually takes weeks for pictures to get reinstalled after a loan show like that. There’s a trip to the conservation lab to check condition, and some curators are big believers in ‘resting’ the paintings, if you can believe that. So it could easily be a month or two before
The Music Lesson
is back on the wall. How about it—are you up for a trip to London, maybe in the spring? She lives at Buckingham Palace. I think they let commoners in these days. They need the cash or something. ‘They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace/Christopher Robin went down with Alice.’ I’d love to go to London with you, Mix, and take you to the National Gallery. There’s so much good art there. My favorite van Eyck.”

Mickey didn’t speak. Somewhat self-conscious about my tendency to ramble and instruct simultaneously, I stopped, and looked down into those eyes of hers again, studied that faint smile, the bemused air somehow also present in the hands playfully splayed on lute strings centuries old.

“Maybe she’s friends with her neighbors up the road at the National Gallery, the Arnolfinis,” I said, breaking the silence. More silence. “They both keep fruit on their windowsills.” Mickey could not have known what I was talking about. Silence again.

We bent our heads and studied her together for a long time then. I held back on any little lectures on
iconography or painterliness or Northern European sensibility or the hilariously named nineteenth-century art dealer Jeronimo de Vries, or anything at all, to let Mickey look at the painting through his own eyes and not mine. In truth, from then to now, Mickey has never indicated to me if he feels anything personal at all for this painting.

“So,
The Music Lesson
it is,” he murmured after a while, as if to himself.

I could sense him looking at me thoughtfully as I studied the color plate in the book some more. I found that I was staring at it without seeing it, I became so conscious of his gaze. He was quiet for so long that it began to spook me, and finally I broke the silence, with a tease.

“Is this my next birthday present? I have to admit I was thinking a little smaller for you, Mix, maybe a nice plain Jaguar XKE. What color would you like? Green, don’t you think?”

“It’s worth millions, isn’t it?” he said quietly, resisting my kidding.

“Well, millions, I guess, sure. Maybe hundreds of millions. Who’s to say? Vermeers don’t just come up at Sotheby’s or Christie’s. There are only—what, not even forty paintings known? Thirty-seven? Thirty-five? I never can quite remember which ones are in and which ones are out of favor. It depends on whom you talk to. Some very orthodox scholars count only about twenty-eight for absolute certain. I myself have a funny feeling
that the girl in the red hat in Washington is not entirely quite right. That one’s on wood, too. But the other little panel portrait in Washington, that girl with a flute, she’s definitely got a problem. She’s way too direct somehow, too enthusiastically present. More of a Maes kind of face, you know? No, of course you don’t, but I can show you and you’ll see it. She’s had a major exfoliation or something in the last couple of hundred years, too, which hasn’t helped. Though it’s my sense that some of the questionable ones were unfinished at the time of his death, and then greedy people messed them around in order to sell them. That would account for what’s right with them as well as what’s wrong with them.”

I sneaked a peek at Mickey to see if he was listening. He seemed to be, so I kept talking.
“The Music Lesson
has never been questioned, by the way, even though it’s on an oak panel. It’s the only absolutely definitely A-OK Vermeer on a wood panel. So, if anything, that might add to its value, I suppose. Its provenance is impeccable. Vermeer’s widow sold it to a baker to settle a debt the year after Vermeer’s death. It paid for bread. Isn’t that amazing? This painting paid for bread for Vermeer’s widow and eleven children.”

I had been enjoying the feeling of letting my own expertise out for a canter, given Mickey’s apparent fascination with my knowingness as much as with the subject
under discussion. But I was suddenly self-conscious, feeling that I was sitting there naked, babbling, making a fool of myself, boring him.

“Just about every Vermeer is in a museum or public collection, anyway,” I concluded. “So it would be impossible to say what this painting would be worth. How much is priceless on the open market?”

“Perfect,” he breathed. “You are perfect, and she is perfect. And she’s a Brit to boot, and she’s owned by Betty Windsor herself, which is brilliance on top of brilliance. I am in love with you both.”

Mickey leaned over and kissed the page, kissed the woman in
The Music Lesson
very softly on the edge of her face, and then he closed the book carefully and put it on the floor beside the bed and lay back on the pillows, pulling me with him. I tugged the covers up, suddenly chilled. He lay on his back contemplatively, with his hands behind his head, as if something momentous had been settled.

“Uh, Mix, does this conversation have any meaning?” I ventured after another long silence.

“This conversation will change your life,” he said.

The first thing I did when I was alone with her—this is something I feel very strongly about and I am not afraid to admit this, though some would think that I risked injuring the painting—was take the panel out of the frame. I did it in order to remove the glass.

I hate glass. I cannot be more emphatic about it. I hate it. It’s a recent trend in museum management, glazing paintings, because it’s cheaper than hiring enough guards and it protects the merchandise—the work of art people glimpse on their way to the interactive CD-ROM installation—from vandalism or accidental damage. Glass also prevents the painting from being fully present. You just can’t
see
a painting under glass.

I don’t care what anybody says: The nonreflective glass is even worse; it absolutely embalms paintings. But even under ordinary glass, the texture is blunted, there are all those damned reflections of ugly light fixtures in the gallery or other people or yourself, and the art just doesn’t breathe. No painter I can think of ever intended his paintings to be viewed through a sheet of glass mounted a quarter inch above the paint surface. In most museums, the lighting is so terrible that looking at paintings under glass isn’t much different from looking at reproductions. If anything, it’s worse.

The public doesn’t know any better. The public, for the most part, probably hasn’t noticed the way glass has become ubiquitous. The public glances at the art and then stampedes to the gift shop anyway. Well, what can I say? It’s the same public that has come to accept sex with condoms. The principles are quite similar. We live in an age of risk, where it is no longer safe for a painting in a public collection to be regarded with the naked eye.

I set her free of that hateful glass, and then, before I
put the panel back into its frame—an excellent Dutch frame, probably eighteenth century, very severe black wood, it’s precisely the right frame for the painting, not one of those “I am a masterpiece” ornate gilt plaster jobbies in which some museums mistakenly imprison their seventeenth-century Dutch pictures—I just sat with the simple painted panel in my two hands and I looked and I looked and I looked. And anything that might happen to me when this is over, however it ends, will be worth that hour.

And no, I don’t know precisely how they did it, though I’m not naïve.

I hope no one was hurt.

I didn’t ask.

M
ICKEY AND
I stayed up all that night talking. I did not go into this blindly. He was right: The conversation did change my life.

Mickey volunteered for the Provos when he was fifteen. It was something he says he always knew he would do, from the time he was a little boy. The Troubles, as they are called here—a simple term for a complex situation—were part of daily life, despite the tranquillity of West Cork. Every evening after the milking, his father would go up the road to the only pub with a television set, where he would gather with some of the men in the village to watch the news of the day’s bombings and shootings in the North and drink pints and talk politics.

By age five, Mickey would accompany his father and
sit on the bar, building houses with beer mats, eating packets of crisps, listening and watching and taking it all in. He was nourished on that hatred, on those obsessions with secrets and retribution.

To sign up with the IRA, Mickey traveled to the North from Dublin, where he told his family he’d gone to spend the weekend with a friend he met at Gaeltacht in Donegal, the traditional summer school to which lots of Irish kids are sent to study Irish. (Based on Mickey’s reports, fluency and romance seem to develop in equal measure in those summer interludes.)

His friend Eamonn O’Doherty was a handsome lad from Howth who had an easy way with all the girls and made people laugh with his brilliant imitations of the priests and nuns who taught them their classes. Mickey, who says he himself was a “pimply, stupid git,” looked up to him tremendously.

Eamonn recruited Mickey into his section, which was made up of lads just like Mickey—passionate boys, raw patriots eager to give up their lives for a free and united Ireland, and eager for weapons more sophisticated than “beggars’ bullets”—rocks.

“It’s a wonder I wasn’t killed three or four times over” is about all Mickey said about his first months as a volunteer, before changing the subject. That’s the extent of what he has told me, but I gather he was used as a donkey to carry bomb-making equipment and to plant
bombs, and I’m fairly certain he had a hand in assembling them, as well.

The reason I think so is because when we were at Pete’s, Mickey was strangely horrified when I offered him and Pete some traditional Christmas fruitcake, the kind that’s roofed with a marzipan slab of icing. It was late, and they were well into the Red Breast, which might account for Mickey’s unguarded reaction. He pushed away the plate, muttering that he loathes marzipan because it smells so much like gelignite, which, he added, gives him terrible headaches.

His innocent face has always helped him to travel freely. Apparently, although he’s been active for ten years now, he’s never been arrested and might not even be on the list of known IRA activists.

There is one more thing Mickey told me about those years: His friend Eamonn was killed beside him as they ran away from a Bogside volunteer action of some kind, probably a bombing organized by their Derry brigade. A British sniper got him. They were both seventeen years old.

We didn’t have much time.

We had ten days before the show closed in The Hague, perhaps another two or three before the paintings would start to leave Holland. Because it was the final venue, the show would no longer travel as one shipment,
but instead, piecemeal, each painting would be returning to its home at the convenience of the lending institution. This would make our work simpler, with the right preparation.